Eight Neat Google Tricks

Google search is a wonderfully powerful tool, and there’s a lot of things that you might not have known about!

You can focus Google on searching a particular website. If you’re having trouble finding the information on a particular site, let Google work for you. Go to www.google.com and type in, for instance, site:smallfish.us dierschow

If all the irrelevant links are getting in the way, you can start eliminating those links. If you’re looking for a Hilton Hotel in Paris, for instance, searching for paris hilton might not work well. But you can trim out some of the excess links by telling Google to not show pages with specific words: paris hilton –celebrity

You can focus on just the recent pages by using the “Date” function under Advanced Search, or using the date filtering under “Show search tools” when you’re looking at the results.

Searching for images in Google is a great way to see what something looks like. Suppose you’re not sure what a “silver grommet” is. Just search for it on Google, look under Images, and you’ll get lots of examples.

You can focus on news around a particular topic or company. When I look for what’s happening in the world of business coaching, I can search for that term and then click on “News.”

Many people aren’t aware that searching for words with quotes around them is different than not using quotes. For example, “red eels” searches for those two words right next to each other, while red eels wants to see those words anywhere on the page. This is great when you have a specific set of words you’re looking for.

How’s this for a specialized use? When I look for a famous quote, I often don’t remember the exact phrase. So I might just search for motherhood and apple pie famous quote and see what sites have examples of quote that are approximately like this.

Google can do all this searching, continually, and notify you when it finds something. Since I have a unique name, I’ve set up a Google Alert (alerts.google.com) for carl dierschow and it sends me an email anytime any page is ever published with my name on it. I also have used this to follow competitors, get news about companies, and keep on top of emerging trends that aren’t covered well on the news.